Tuesday, October 09, 2007
A laborious and fatiguing operation
Benjamin Franklin's "On the Art of Swimming" (courtesy of Eighteenth-Century Collections Online)
Monday, October 08, 2007
Baboon metaphysics
Nicholas Wade at the Times on how baboons think. In particular there is lovely slideshow and video, watching those juveniles prancing across the water reminds me that for some years in elementary school I was very certain that I would grow up and study primates for a living...
(One of my favorite books of all time is Robert Sapolsky's wonderful A Primate's Memoir--only parts of it are so sad that it is almost unbearable...)
(One of my favorite books of all time is Robert Sapolsky's wonderful A Primate's Memoir--only parts of it are so sad that it is almost unbearable...)
Sparkles
Nico's getting some very nice coverage for upcoming events; details concerning the ballet he's written the music for can be found here. Here's one story, and here's another (in which my running partner L. makes a very brief appearance, much to her chagrin--she is getting more publicity than she approves of this week, much to her moral credit she prefers to fly below the radar!).
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Frivolity
(Sport-related, but perhaps of mild general interest...)
My Amazon search for Honey Stinger energy gels (I have been using Clif Shot Blocks and like 'em very much for training, but they take an awful lot of chewing to get down in a race situation, and I don't like the regular gels because they're unnaturally salty, it's just not right...) yielded a farfetched "Sexy Honey Bee" outfit! 
Hmmm, I do not think I will be ordering that one--but I like the miscellaneous nature of the cross-category Amazon search...
(Here are some other Halloween options from the same company, if you're looking for a costume...)
My Amazon search for Honey Stinger energy gels (I have been using Clif Shot Blocks and like 'em very much for training, but they take an awful lot of chewing to get down in a race situation, and I don't like the regular gels because they're unnaturally salty, it's just not right...) yielded a farfetched "Sexy Honey Bee" outfit! 
Hmmm, I do not think I will be ordering that one--but I like the miscellaneous nature of the cross-category Amazon search...
(Here are some other Halloween options from the same company, if you're looking for a costume...)
The passing of the hyphen
Charles McGrath at the Times on the hyphen's purging from the new Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:
The issue of proper hyphenation has always been vexing for the Brits, far more than it is for us, and occasioned perhaps the single crankiest article in Fowler’s “Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” first published in 1926.
“The chaos prevailing among writers or printers or both regarding the use of hyphens is discreditable to English education,” he began, and about halfway through he threw up his hands and said of the examples he had been citing, “the evidence they afford” is “that common sense is in fact far from common.”
Fowler was in favor of hyphens. They sprinkle his own text like dandruff and, along with his fetish for the ampersand, give it a musty, old-fashioned look. This is why designers hate to see hyphens flecking the page, and indeed they are antique, unnecessary marks in many instances.
But that’s also part of their appeal. They’re records of how the language changes, and in the old days, before the Shorter Oxford got into the sundering business, they indicated a sort of halfway point, a way station in the progress of a new usage. Two terms get linked together — “tiddly-wink,” let’s say, or “cell-phone” — and then over time that little hitch is eroded, worn away by familiarity. In a few years, for example, people will be amused to discover that email used to be e-mail.
A tale of obsession
Most of what I did on Friday during a delinquently day off was read an altogether gripping book to get me in the race mood, Richard Askwith's Feet in the Clouds: A Tale of Fell-Running and Obsession. It is quite wonderful!
(I cannot now remember who recommended it to me, but it was a commenter here, I think--many thanks...)
It is impossible, really, to make predictions about the choices our future selves will make; I would not for instance five years ago have predicted a triathlon-related obsession for myself. But it is extremely unlikely that I will ever take up fell-running: I like a hot shower, I don't seek out the outdoors, I don't have much of a head for heights and also (most devastatingly) I've got an absolutely dreadful sense of direction. I could imagine taking to sailing and becomingly devastatingly accurate with both old-fashioned and modern tools of navigation, it's not the technical aspect that bothers me and at sea everything looks more or less the same anyway. In fell-running or mountaineering more generally, though, the lack of familiarity I feel when faced even with a bit of landscape that I've seen fifty times before would be a definitive limiter... BUT if there is one book that could make me think I am wrong and that really fell-running is the perfect activity, it is this one.
(But really it's my friend L. who should do it, the descriptions of the death-defying plunges down slopes of scree etc. at headlong uncontrollable speed have her name written all over them!)
Anyway if you have any interest in this sort of thing, broadly speaking, or in the question of trials of human endurance more generally, I strongly recommend Askwith's book. In fact I am just going to paste in scans of a few favorite pages to give you the flavor and show you why you must get hold of a copy (unfortunately I have had this one from the library, so I am prevented from pressing it into the hands of any one of the numerous people I know who would undoubtedly enjoy it).
(It is not a perfect book--it's very well-written, chapter by chapter, but I think there's simply too much material, too many different characters, too many different races to keep track of--in this case less really would have been more, though I can see why it would have been difficult to trim it down--everything is pretty fascinating in its own right. An admirable impulse to celebrate and memorialize the great fell-runners makes Askwith downplay his own story of self-discovery for the sake of a kind of composite portrait of the sport, but I think this is one case--unusual among sports writing--in which more rather than less of the author's own obsessive journey would have been welcome. My favorite thing, BTW, out of all of the new information that burst into my awareness while reading: the Man versus Horse Marathon in Wales!)
Macho pub conversation re: the Bob Graham Round
An extreme set of hill repeats
The crux of the matter
The choice
(I cannot now remember who recommended it to me, but it was a commenter here, I think--many thanks...)
It is impossible, really, to make predictions about the choices our future selves will make; I would not for instance five years ago have predicted a triathlon-related obsession for myself. But it is extremely unlikely that I will ever take up fell-running: I like a hot shower, I don't seek out the outdoors, I don't have much of a head for heights and also (most devastatingly) I've got an absolutely dreadful sense of direction. I could imagine taking to sailing and becomingly devastatingly accurate with both old-fashioned and modern tools of navigation, it's not the technical aspect that bothers me and at sea everything looks more or less the same anyway. In fell-running or mountaineering more generally, though, the lack of familiarity I feel when faced even with a bit of landscape that I've seen fifty times before would be a definitive limiter... BUT if there is one book that could make me think I am wrong and that really fell-running is the perfect activity, it is this one.
(But really it's my friend L. who should do it, the descriptions of the death-defying plunges down slopes of scree etc. at headlong uncontrollable speed have her name written all over them!)
Anyway if you have any interest in this sort of thing, broadly speaking, or in the question of trials of human endurance more generally, I strongly recommend Askwith's book. In fact I am just going to paste in scans of a few favorite pages to give you the flavor and show you why you must get hold of a copy (unfortunately I have had this one from the library, so I am prevented from pressing it into the hands of any one of the numerous people I know who would undoubtedly enjoy it).
(It is not a perfect book--it's very well-written, chapter by chapter, but I think there's simply too much material, too many different characters, too many different races to keep track of--in this case less really would have been more, though I can see why it would have been difficult to trim it down--everything is pretty fascinating in its own right. An admirable impulse to celebrate and memorialize the great fell-runners makes Askwith downplay his own story of self-discovery for the sake of a kind of composite portrait of the sport, but I think this is one case--unusual among sports writing--in which more rather than less of the author's own obsessive journey would have been welcome. My favorite thing, BTW, out of all of the new information that burst into my awareness while reading: the Man versus Horse Marathon in Wales!)
Macho pub conversation re: the Bob Graham Round
An extreme set of hill repeats
The crux of the matter
The choice
Sylvia's Magnetism
The Telegraph prints a series of letters by Ted Hughes. They show him in an extraordinarily unflattering light--and then at the end, a rather lovely little anthology of his comments on various literary types brought me back round in sympathy to him. There's a great details about T. S. Eliot's "huge thick hands - unexpected," and here's another taste:
I was once in the pen-shop, top of Regent St, with Alvarez, and I exclaimed about an extraordinary portly magnificent pen in the display case. Alvarez also exclaimed & laughed – "It looks like Cyril Connolly." I don't know how the remark was intended – no idea what Alvarez felt about C.C. – but the comic idea seemed just right – it endeared both Cyril Connolly & pen to me. So I later got the pen, & I still use it. It was my first meeting with a Mont Blanc
Journalistic cliche
I clicked on this NYT story about Hamburg because (though I've never been there) I'm kind of in love with that city--it's part of the New Hanseatic League of my novel, and it's got that lovely northern watery feel that made me fall so hard for Tallinn and Stockholm.
(And then recently I watched the most amazing thing online, the elite men's race in the world triathlon championships--it all takes place against the extraordinarily beautiful city backdrops--and unbeknownst to me, since it was pretty much the first one I ever watched, the finish of the elite men's race was a once-in-a-lifetime amazingly exciting thing, go and watch it if you want to see what I'm saying...)
But I was caught short by an annoying sentence at the end of the first paragraph:
Where else but this high-low metropolis can you window-shop for Cartier diamond necklaces during the day and slum it with punk rockers at night?
Um, PROBABLY EVERY MAJOR CITY IN THE WORLD?!?
(And then recently I watched the most amazing thing online, the elite men's race in the world triathlon championships--it all takes place against the extraordinarily beautiful city backdrops--and unbeknownst to me, since it was pretty much the first one I ever watched, the finish of the elite men's race was a once-in-a-lifetime amazingly exciting thing, go and watch it if you want to see what I'm saying...)
But I was caught short by an annoying sentence at the end of the first paragraph:
Where else but this high-low metropolis can you window-shop for Cartier diamond necklaces during the day and slum it with punk rockers at night?
Um, PROBABLY EVERY MAJOR CITY IN THE WORLD?!?
Saturday, October 06, 2007
1:59:07
Sub-2:00! I did not make my ambitious pace goal of 1:58, but this was as fast as I could cover the ground on a hot and disgustingly humid morning on a hilly course, and I am pleased with my time. The first five miles felt fabulous--my taper really worked. After that, it was a slog, with more heat and humidity than seemed bearable, and extra will-power required at several stages. Further details follow below.
(I had brunch afterwards with my training partner L., and then had to hustle straight to my 2pm swimming lesson, having fortunately realized around midnight last night that smooth scheduling today would depend on bringing swimming stuff with me and checking the bag at the race, since the brunch restaurant is only 10 blocks from the swim-lesson locale and there was not really enough time to stop at home between. I was a little worried about whether I would be functional for the lesson, but it worked out well, we worked on backstroke which is not rough on the legs...)
(Then I came home for literally about 25 minutes, had a quick shower--much needed by that point, swimming pool kind of washed away the sweat with chlorine!--and raced off to see a quite delightful new musical called Sherlock Holmes: The Early Years, part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival. I was tipped off to it by one of my correspondents, and I'm extremely glad I made the effort to get there, as it's quite hilarious--the book, the lyrics, the music, the acting, everything was great. I never see musicals, the conventions of musical theatre are quite bizarre in ways this show lovingly acknowledges...)
Sports-related content follows below.
Further thoughts re: the race:
I've been doing my weekly long run at a considerably slower pace since that half-marathon in early August, and I must say I think this kind of training strongly suits me. (Well, maybe it's just common sense and everyone trains like this--certainly it is rather orthodox in the good books about running training, nothing shocking here.) The fact that I took a minute off my last time though I've been running rather less suggests to me that I should keep up the long slow(ish) distance thing through the winter and not worry too much about speedwork. If I did some hill repeats every couple weeks, and a shortish tempo run each week, but keep all the long ones and some of the other short ones sort of 10:00 pace or even slower (since I am not quite iron-willed I find this difficult, easier just to run faster, but it can be leveraged externally by arranging to do a run with a friend who's slower), I think it will be good. I really want to raise my mileage--I think I still have not had a week over 25 miles, or maybe one or two weeks just over but not seriously--35 would be better, and not at all immoderate I think. But the constraints of triathlon training make this a bit daunting (swimming plans through the next couple months have me swimming five times a week for instance, and I must start having at least 3 weekly sessions on the bike!), and I'm still paranoid about injury--so keeping things slow will be good as I try and squeeze in some additional short runs during the week.
(Actually now I think about it, I can see it will be a real strain to get anywhere near 35 unless I cut back on other stuff. 10-12 for the weekly Saturday long one, add in a couple 3s to existing exercise sessions--like do 3 on the treadmill after working out with the trainer on Monday morning, and 3-4 more on Sunday post-conjectural but as yet unrealized bike ride--and a Tuesday 6 and a Thursday 5 still only makes 30, and that's optimistic. I shouldn't do a 12-mile run every week yet, much as I'd like to--this is better saved for when I'm a several-steps-more-experienced runner. Will mull this one over... maybe sticking with a consistent 25 will do me fine for now.)
The problem with doing those long slow runs is that I'm a much worse pacer now than when I was really concentrating on it over the summer! I ran too fast at the beginning, and it hurt me in the middle, though I pulled things together for the last couple miles for sure.
My mile splits were as follows, off the device (I do not have splits for the August race, because I forgot to check the battery on the pod, but my pacing was much more even--the terrain of course is quite uneven):
9:01, 9:04, 9:01, 8:56, 8:46, 9:12, 8:40, 9:23, 9:30, 9:03, 9:28, 8:43, 8:32 (plus a little bit at the end not worth counting). My actual running speed didn't change nearly as much as these numbers suggest, but I had to take some walk breaks in the last five miles.
Average pace: 9:05. But I have a feeling I could have shaved maybe 30 seconds off my total time if I had just done the first seven miles a hair slower...
(The urge to "build up" a time reserve by running fast in the beginning of a long race is exactly as misguided as the urge to "save calories for later" if you're keeping food intake low for weight loss--i.e. DO run slower at the beginning, DO eat food in the morning--another thought I was pondering as I ran, there is a lot of time to think out there!)
Finally, rest. I had significantly better sleep this week--or more of it at any rate--than I did the week of the Nike half. I could always use more, but I actually slept eleven hours on Thursday night and then took Friday pretty much totally off. Slept maybe six hours last night too, which is very decent. Obviously it makes a great physical difference--in the Nike race, I was laboring right from the start, my HR went up to the low 170s right away and I couldn't get it back into the 160s except very briefly. Today, solidly in 160s (upper 160s, but that's the heat...) until mile 10 or so when I definitively tipped over into the 170s.
(Hmmm, top HR late in the race was 188, that certainly gives me a number I can use as official max, at the end I was running so hard I was practically hyperventilating--avg. HR 184 in final quarter of a mile.)
But the real thing sleep does for you is restore willpower. Cumulative tiredness of the kind that results from multiple weeks of neglecting sleep erodes willpower, and the thing you need to meet your goal for a race like this is to be able to say at whatever moment(s) things seem most difficult (I definitely had a moment of this around mile eleven point something, where I thought, "Goodness I do feel mildly queasy, and it is hot, and I am awfully tempted just to walk the rest of the way, it would be entirely understandable") OH, NO, OF COURSE I AM CONTINUING, I WOULD NOT THINK ABOUT STOPPING! And it is a lot easier to say this, and more plausible that one can utter the words with conviction, if one has had some rest.
(I used up about six months' worth of stamina in the last week of working on my tenure materials and book manuscript at the beginning of September--I will just confess it, though it is mildly inappropriate, but I was working about as hard as is humanly possible, culminating in a Mon.-Tues-Wed.-Thurs. night stretch where I don't think I slept more than three and a half hours each night--you know, where you get up at 5 so that you can write for a couple hours before sorting out notes for your nine o'clock lecture. It was brutal, and I hope not to submit myself to that discipline again soon--on the other hand, there was something perversely comforting about it, it reminded me of many a time before in my life when I have worked in exactly this way! But I am striving for better balance, it is my goal to be a calm and non-workaholic person who takes things easy ... [!])
(I had brunch afterwards with my training partner L., and then had to hustle straight to my 2pm swimming lesson, having fortunately realized around midnight last night that smooth scheduling today would depend on bringing swimming stuff with me and checking the bag at the race, since the brunch restaurant is only 10 blocks from the swim-lesson locale and there was not really enough time to stop at home between. I was a little worried about whether I would be functional for the lesson, but it worked out well, we worked on backstroke which is not rough on the legs...)
(Then I came home for literally about 25 minutes, had a quick shower--much needed by that point, swimming pool kind of washed away the sweat with chlorine!--and raced off to see a quite delightful new musical called Sherlock Holmes: The Early Years, part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival. I was tipped off to it by one of my correspondents, and I'm extremely glad I made the effort to get there, as it's quite hilarious--the book, the lyrics, the music, the acting, everything was great. I never see musicals, the conventions of musical theatre are quite bizarre in ways this show lovingly acknowledges...)
Sports-related content follows below.
Further thoughts re: the race:
I've been doing my weekly long run at a considerably slower pace since that half-marathon in early August, and I must say I think this kind of training strongly suits me. (Well, maybe it's just common sense and everyone trains like this--certainly it is rather orthodox in the good books about running training, nothing shocking here.) The fact that I took a minute off my last time though I've been running rather less suggests to me that I should keep up the long slow(ish) distance thing through the winter and not worry too much about speedwork. If I did some hill repeats every couple weeks, and a shortish tempo run each week, but keep all the long ones and some of the other short ones sort of 10:00 pace or even slower (since I am not quite iron-willed I find this difficult, easier just to run faster, but it can be leveraged externally by arranging to do a run with a friend who's slower), I think it will be good. I really want to raise my mileage--I think I still have not had a week over 25 miles, or maybe one or two weeks just over but not seriously--35 would be better, and not at all immoderate I think. But the constraints of triathlon training make this a bit daunting (swimming plans through the next couple months have me swimming five times a week for instance, and I must start having at least 3 weekly sessions on the bike!), and I'm still paranoid about injury--so keeping things slow will be good as I try and squeeze in some additional short runs during the week.
(Actually now I think about it, I can see it will be a real strain to get anywhere near 35 unless I cut back on other stuff. 10-12 for the weekly Saturday long one, add in a couple 3s to existing exercise sessions--like do 3 on the treadmill after working out with the trainer on Monday morning, and 3-4 more on Sunday post-conjectural but as yet unrealized bike ride--and a Tuesday 6 and a Thursday 5 still only makes 30, and that's optimistic. I shouldn't do a 12-mile run every week yet, much as I'd like to--this is better saved for when I'm a several-steps-more-experienced runner. Will mull this one over... maybe sticking with a consistent 25 will do me fine for now.)
The problem with doing those long slow runs is that I'm a much worse pacer now than when I was really concentrating on it over the summer! I ran too fast at the beginning, and it hurt me in the middle, though I pulled things together for the last couple miles for sure.
My mile splits were as follows, off the device (I do not have splits for the August race, because I forgot to check the battery on the pod, but my pacing was much more even--the terrain of course is quite uneven):
9:01, 9:04, 9:01, 8:56, 8:46, 9:12, 8:40, 9:23, 9:30, 9:03, 9:28, 8:43, 8:32 (plus a little bit at the end not worth counting). My actual running speed didn't change nearly as much as these numbers suggest, but I had to take some walk breaks in the last five miles.
Average pace: 9:05. But I have a feeling I could have shaved maybe 30 seconds off my total time if I had just done the first seven miles a hair slower...
(The urge to "build up" a time reserve by running fast in the beginning of a long race is exactly as misguided as the urge to "save calories for later" if you're keeping food intake low for weight loss--i.e. DO run slower at the beginning, DO eat food in the morning--another thought I was pondering as I ran, there is a lot of time to think out there!)
Finally, rest. I had significantly better sleep this week--or more of it at any rate--than I did the week of the Nike half. I could always use more, but I actually slept eleven hours on Thursday night and then took Friday pretty much totally off. Slept maybe six hours last night too, which is very decent. Obviously it makes a great physical difference--in the Nike race, I was laboring right from the start, my HR went up to the low 170s right away and I couldn't get it back into the 160s except very briefly. Today, solidly in 160s (upper 160s, but that's the heat...) until mile 10 or so when I definitively tipped over into the 170s.
(Hmmm, top HR late in the race was 188, that certainly gives me a number I can use as official max, at the end I was running so hard I was practically hyperventilating--avg. HR 184 in final quarter of a mile.)
But the real thing sleep does for you is restore willpower. Cumulative tiredness of the kind that results from multiple weeks of neglecting sleep erodes willpower, and the thing you need to meet your goal for a race like this is to be able to say at whatever moment(s) things seem most difficult (I definitely had a moment of this around mile eleven point something, where I thought, "Goodness I do feel mildly queasy, and it is hot, and I am awfully tempted just to walk the rest of the way, it would be entirely understandable") OH, NO, OF COURSE I AM CONTINUING, I WOULD NOT THINK ABOUT STOPPING! And it is a lot easier to say this, and more plausible that one can utter the words with conviction, if one has had some rest.
(I used up about six months' worth of stamina in the last week of working on my tenure materials and book manuscript at the beginning of September--I will just confess it, though it is mildly inappropriate, but I was working about as hard as is humanly possible, culminating in a Mon.-Tues-Wed.-Thurs. night stretch where I don't think I slept more than three and a half hours each night--you know, where you get up at 5 so that you can write for a couple hours before sorting out notes for your nine o'clock lecture. It was brutal, and I hope not to submit myself to that discipline again soon--on the other hand, there was something perversely comforting about it, it reminded me of many a time before in my life when I have worked in exactly this way! But I am striving for better balance, it is my goal to be a calm and non-workaholic person who takes things easy ... [!])
Friday, October 05, 2007
The Crow Cam
An amazing story about crows' use of tools--as documented by miniature cameras attached beneath the birds' tail-feathers.
(I had better luck with the video clips here.)
All this is very suggestive--it's the sort of thing it would be worth delving into much more deeply if you were writing a novel from the point of view of a bird--and indeed I came across a another quite lovely story just now at the BBC site that I think is going to make its way into my next novel in one form or another...
(I had better luck with the video clips here.)
All this is very suggestive--it's the sort of thing it would be worth delving into much more deeply if you were writing a novel from the point of view of a bird--and indeed I came across a another quite lovely story just now at the BBC site that I think is going to make its way into my next novel in one form or another...
The aspirational sub-2:00 club
Nico Muhly at the Guardian on why fusion's a bad word:
Nico's got a concert tonight in the Wordless Music series. I had fully intended to go, only I think the requirements of mental health and tomorrow morning's race mean that I should stay at home and have a quiet evening swim instead. It's the evocatively named Grete's Great Gallop half-marathon in Central Park tomorrow morning, and I am quite looking forward to it (this is the important thing!) only with reservations about my time goals.
(The race is named for Norwegian marathoner Grete Waitz--usually I am a skeptic on lotteries and raffles, the prizes are inherently so undesirable, but this time I really did bother to fill out the entry form for a prize that would be entrance and hotel and airfare for the Oslo marathon, doesn't that sound magical?!?)
On the one hand, I desperately want to go sub-2:00! I've done quite a few additional long runs since the Nike half-marathon in early August (my time there was seven seconds over two hours)--there were a couple weekends where I only did a short one for one reason or another, but I see from my log that I did 6 miles, 8 miles, 10 miles, 12 miles on successive Saturdays in August and early September, and then 10 on 9/15 and 12 on 9/22. My mid-week runs were slightly inconsistent due to life factors beyond my control, but I stepped up the swimming and my swimming conditioning has certainly improved, and I've been steady on the gym workouts etc. I don't think I've lost running fitness or speed, in other words, and my endurance for long runs should be slightly better.
On the other hand, my hope of improving my time was mainly contingent on temperature--the course for this one is significantly hillier (twice as hilly, really--the last one was one park loop plus 7 very flat miles through the city, whereas this is twice round in the hilly park plus a bit extra, so much harder work), and I was hoping that a nice mid-50s temperature would make it possible for me to do much better. But the weather here's been horribly in the 80s this week, and tomorrow's forecast and 9am start time means that quite a bit of my race will be in the upper 70s.
So: if I feel good in the morning, I'm going to try again for 1:58 (9:00 pace). I'm more likely to hit exactly the same time I had before, or even a little slower: say 9:10 mile pace. (I'm pretty sure that barring unforeseen calamity or pacing disaster, I won't go slower than 9:20, so let's say 2:02 as outside time. 1:58 optimistic, 2:00 realistic, 2:02 non-ideal. And of course really anything can happen on the day, I must not get too het up about it!)
If I go sub-2:00, great. If not, I've got one more chance at sub-2:00 in 2007. I'm doing a half-marathon in Philadelphia the week before Thanksgiving--I've been thinking of it as a fun run with family members, at whatever speed we're comfortable with as a group, and I'd prefer to run it that way if possible. But if I don't make my time goal now, I will alter plans slightly and race that one rather than simply running it. It's an extremely flat course, and it's hard to imagine hot temperatures in late November in Philadelphia. (I don't mind rain and cold nearly so much.) So that gives me an excellent shot at meeting my goal.
If you are born in Pakistan and move to England and are involved in the daily business of feeding your family, is that food inherently "fusion cuisine?" In the interchange between contemporary classical musicians and rock musicians, there is a lot of name-calling of this sort when, in reality, there is no crossing over: if I call my friend in France and we communicate in English and French combined, it's because we want to talk to each other, not because we want to make a point about the way we just communicated.Some interesting points there about notated and non-notated music, I am finding myself with an ongoing minor obsession with questions of notation...
Nico's got a concert tonight in the Wordless Music series. I had fully intended to go, only I think the requirements of mental health and tomorrow morning's race mean that I should stay at home and have a quiet evening swim instead. It's the evocatively named Grete's Great Gallop half-marathon in Central Park tomorrow morning, and I am quite looking forward to it (this is the important thing!) only with reservations about my time goals.
(The race is named for Norwegian marathoner Grete Waitz--usually I am a skeptic on lotteries and raffles, the prizes are inherently so undesirable, but this time I really did bother to fill out the entry form for a prize that would be entrance and hotel and airfare for the Oslo marathon, doesn't that sound magical?!?)
On the one hand, I desperately want to go sub-2:00! I've done quite a few additional long runs since the Nike half-marathon in early August (my time there was seven seconds over two hours)--there were a couple weekends where I only did a short one for one reason or another, but I see from my log that I did 6 miles, 8 miles, 10 miles, 12 miles on successive Saturdays in August and early September, and then 10 on 9/15 and 12 on 9/22. My mid-week runs were slightly inconsistent due to life factors beyond my control, but I stepped up the swimming and my swimming conditioning has certainly improved, and I've been steady on the gym workouts etc. I don't think I've lost running fitness or speed, in other words, and my endurance for long runs should be slightly better.
On the other hand, my hope of improving my time was mainly contingent on temperature--the course for this one is significantly hillier (twice as hilly, really--the last one was one park loop plus 7 very flat miles through the city, whereas this is twice round in the hilly park plus a bit extra, so much harder work), and I was hoping that a nice mid-50s temperature would make it possible for me to do much better. But the weather here's been horribly in the 80s this week, and tomorrow's forecast and 9am start time means that quite a bit of my race will be in the upper 70s.
So: if I feel good in the morning, I'm going to try again for 1:58 (9:00 pace). I'm more likely to hit exactly the same time I had before, or even a little slower: say 9:10 mile pace. (I'm pretty sure that barring unforeseen calamity or pacing disaster, I won't go slower than 9:20, so let's say 2:02 as outside time. 1:58 optimistic, 2:00 realistic, 2:02 non-ideal. And of course really anything can happen on the day, I must not get too het up about it!)
If I go sub-2:00, great. If not, I've got one more chance at sub-2:00 in 2007. I'm doing a half-marathon in Philadelphia the week before Thanksgiving--I've been thinking of it as a fun run with family members, at whatever speed we're comfortable with as a group, and I'd prefer to run it that way if possible. But if I don't make my time goal now, I will alter plans slightly and race that one rather than simply running it. It's an extremely flat course, and it's hard to imagine hot temperatures in late November in Philadelphia. (I don't mind rain and cold nearly so much.) So that gives me an excellent shot at meeting my goal.
X marks the spot
It always feels incredibly decadent to go out to the theater on a 'school' night, but that was exactly what I did on Wednesday, and to a show that greatly exceeded my fairly modest expectations: Margaret Cho's The Sensuous Woman. I'm kind of allergic to stand-up comedy (in fact high up on my list of dislikes should be people handing out flyers to comedy clubs--and comedy clubs themselves...), but this really was hilarious, a wonderful mix of great material very effectively delivered by Cho and others and the most delightful burlesque acts. There's a serious underlying point about the miraculous variety of female body types, but it never gets foolish or sentimental because of the sharpness of the material (this is in contrast to a quite awful Eve Ensler show with similar aspirations that I saw a few years ago and hated, Ensler made me have my most stony-faced hard-hearted unwillingness to laugh).
Several of the women in particular really have the most extraordinary figures, like nothing you will ever usually see and quite lovely. Two of my favorites (I've just updated the first one with a better picture, I did not realize the other one would come out so small):
Dirty Martini
Selene Luna
(I couldn't stop thinking during the show about how much my friend Helen would have loved it. I've been thinking a lot about Helen recently--I had a dream last week in which I was delighted to recognize the skyscape familiar to me from two of Helen's animated films, "Scratch and Crow" and "Mouseholes," with interesting objects like chickens and gravestones and teapots floating through a scratchy black sky. Helen's films will be shown on Oct. 24 in New York at the Anthology Film Archives; do take this chance to see them if you're New York-based and have any leaning this way, they are absolutely magical.)
Cho's show is at The Zipper Factory, and I strongly recommend it if you want to see something bawdy, hilarious and visually delightful; also there is a rather lovely restaurant next door these days, traditionally that stretch of West 37th St. has been something of a gastronomical wasteland so make note of an excellent place to eat between 8th and 9th Avenue. The food was very satisfactory (I had rather delicious steamed mussels with coriander and cilantro, and my dining companion had brisket!), but the space itself could legitimately lay claim to being a top-ten most-beautiful dining experience, it's got the feel of the old zipper factory (for real) with some rather lavish and lovely and mildly theatrical/set-dressy interior decoration (sort of open to the theater next door, as far as I could tell, so that most of the performers were passing through as we ate our meal). Check it out if you find yourself in the neighborhood...
Several of the women in particular really have the most extraordinary figures, like nothing you will ever usually see and quite lovely. Two of my favorites (I've just updated the first one with a better picture, I did not realize the other one would come out so small):
Dirty Martini
Selene Luna(I couldn't stop thinking during the show about how much my friend Helen would have loved it. I've been thinking a lot about Helen recently--I had a dream last week in which I was delighted to recognize the skyscape familiar to me from two of Helen's animated films, "Scratch and Crow" and "Mouseholes," with interesting objects like chickens and gravestones and teapots floating through a scratchy black sky. Helen's films will be shown on Oct. 24 in New York at the Anthology Film Archives; do take this chance to see them if you're New York-based and have any leaning this way, they are absolutely magical.)
Cho's show is at The Zipper Factory, and I strongly recommend it if you want to see something bawdy, hilarious and visually delightful; also there is a rather lovely restaurant next door these days, traditionally that stretch of West 37th St. has been something of a gastronomical wasteland so make note of an excellent place to eat between 8th and 9th Avenue. The food was very satisfactory (I had rather delicious steamed mussels with coriander and cilantro, and my dining companion had brisket!), but the space itself could legitimately lay claim to being a top-ten most-beautiful dining experience, it's got the feel of the old zipper factory (for real) with some rather lavish and lovely and mildly theatrical/set-dressy interior decoration (sort of open to the theater next door, as far as I could tell, so that most of the performers were passing through as we ate our meal). Check it out if you find yourself in the neighborhood...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
